Multiplicative Retransmission of Reed-Solomon Codes in Hybrid ARQ Systems

Reed-Solomon (RS) codes have been widely used in many areas, and they are usually used together with Hybrid Automatic Retransmission reQuest (HARQ). In this letter, a new multiplicative retransmission scheme is proposed for the RS HARQ systems. In the proposed scheme, the repeated symbols in retransmission are firstly multiplied by the coefficients randomly selected from the Galois field that is used to construct the RS code, and then are sent. It is analytically shown that the error rate union bound of the multiplicative retransmission is lower than that of the direct repeat retransmission. Simulation results prove the increased performance of the multiplicative retransmission.